Swedish painter Jens Fänge who has a solo exhibition at Perrotin talks about the unattended corners of the mind and sometimes dreams. By Osman Can Yerebakan for Elephant.
Jens Fänge plays a dare game with his paintings. Stepping into his Stockholm studio in the mornings, he finds himself avoiding the last painting he was working on the previous night. A mind game or a kink if you will, the diss helps Fänge to rationalize his affiliation with his own creative urges and even understand where his mind was headed when he turned the studio’s lights off last night. “It is an act of disregarding the painting, and even being impolite to it,” he tells Elephant. He busies himself by making coffee and tending other paintings, and “when I can’t stand not looking at it any longer and when the painting least expects it,” he muses, “I turn and look at it.” The cowboy-sharp stare back at the ignored work ushers the artist to discover its new aspects, “because the painting looks back at me.”
Fänge’s ongoing exhibition, Antechamber, at Perrotin’s New York gallery holds traces of such jabs at a range of new paintings (all 2026). Whispers and stares linger across oil, vinyl, and fabric surfaces on which faces, interiors, and objects cut through one another like fleeting seconds that trick the eye similar to last night’s dream.
Like a memory misfire, the vignettes overlap instances some of which read as familiar while others feel breezily foreign. Peeping eyes and spectral corners burgeon across Fänge’s juxtapositions of various textures and hues. In the Swedish painter’s dream-state paintings, we find ourselves eyeing through doors left eerily ajar, not unlike a guest overstaying their welcome. Figures with deadpan expressions lock their expressions to empty corners which the artist calmly populates with bold colors and occasionally hypnotic patterns.
A silence awaits to be shattered in the layering of figures most of which are humans, in addition to a few animals over inviting staircases or unassuming windows. In Kammerspiel, a massive bat with a fish-like face hovers above an inviting couch with striped fabric. The nocturnal avian’s unrealistically large scale is proven by the nearby male figure whose masked face stands between ridicule and desperation. For Fänge, animals signal “the tension between being in control and forced to obey” through their positions of equal freedom and domestication in our daily life.
The viewers would be forgiven to read the disproportioned scales and off angles in Fänge’s paintings as outcomes of his personal dreams. Between a dissolved afterthought and an intentional recollection, they embody this dreamlike unrestraint from daily logic. He, however, assures that he is “careful not to depict a certain dream of his or even analyze them.” The painter instead expresses a fascination to “structures and textures” of the fruits of his subconsciousness. “The colors and the warped perspective” are elements he cites as suggestions he borrows from his own dreams.
Vita Nova and Diplomat, for example, embody figures disengaged with the viewer’s gaze. The first painting’s female figure which Fänge sourced from a newspaper photograph of a recently-resigned Swedish politician looks away from us with a restful introspection. The peculiarity escalates on the painting’s right side with what appears as a female bust, in this case her eyes tightly shut like in the moment of deep sleep or simply, demise. Both figures’ commitment to avoid the very moment rejects any mundane logic to verbalize the painting; instead, they mediate on the limitlessness of a picture plane, a midway between germination and finale of a vision in mind before it settles on the eye. The upper female figure in the painting Niki is none other than Niki de Saint Phalle, borrowed from an image of her shooting at paint-filled balloons to create abstract paintings in 1960s. Devoid of the gun, the aiming gesture here appears playful and narratively abstract. The copper-accented surface’s true protagonist is an other female character whose large portrait is decorated with a minuscule child that appears at the bottom of her eye like a tear drop about to fall.
This interplay between figures partially results from Fänge’s habit of working on multiple paintings at a time, all horizontally. At his harbor studio which was once the canteen of a banana importing factory, he lay outs his surfaces to conduct different textures and characters until they each crescendo to a visual potpourris. “This way the characters get acquainted with each other and can move in and out paintings,” says the artist who likens the format to “connected characters in a novel.”
The occasional reappearance of his figures in different paintings is a gesture Fänge likens to a song’s chorus. “Think of the rhythm in repetition,” he says about his studio ritual of revisiting his paintings when the instant feels right, “and to a certain degree, this is my reflection of my way of thinking back and forth.”
Jens Fänge: Antechamber is on view through May 30, 2026.
